In-depth, one-on-one conversations with founders, CEOs, and makers. The journey, lessons learned, and the struggles. Let’s do this! Host Adam Stacoviak dives deep into the trials, tribulations, successes, and failures of industry leading entrepreneurs, leaders, innovators, and visionaries.
Journey to CEO, again
Today Adam is joined by Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. Evan’s journey to become the CEO was not by way of founder, in this company. Evan has founded several companies in the past, and he’s been in a CEO position for more than 22 years. But InfluxData was founded by Paul Dix, and Paul knew years ago that his role (best role?) was to lead the technical and product direction of the company, which lead him to Evan. Today we share that story as well as a glimpse into operating the business that built the defacto platform for building time series applications with deep roots in open source.
The future of code search
Today Adam is joined by Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph. He’s been tracking Sourcegraph for years now and knew one day they would hit Unicorn status, and that happened this year. They’re just off a massive $125M Series D funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.625B valuation to bring code search to every developer. The future of code search has never been more clear and we’re excited to share today’s show with you.
Iterating to globally distributed apps and databases
Today Adam is joined by Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly.io — a platform for running full stack apps and databases close to users. This conversation with Kurt talks through his journey as a developer and entrepreneur, fundraising, getting into Y Combinator (twice), and how they’ve iterated on the Fly platform since 2017 to get to where they are right now.
The acquisition of a lifetime
On today’s show Adam is joined by John Nunemaker (an old friend). For some of you listening you might remember John’s appearance on The Changelog #11, which was basically forever ago. Or his company Ordered List — they made Gauges, Harmony, and Speaker Deck which was quite popular in its time — so much so that they attracted the attention of Chris Wanstrath, one of the co-founders of GitHub to acquire Ordered List. The rest as they say is history. Today, John and I go back through that history to see what it was like to be acquired by GitHub and how that single choice has forever changed his life.
Leading Auth0 to a $6.5 billion acquisition
This week Adam is joined by Eugenio Pace, co-founder and CEO of Auth0. Auth0 is a for developers, by developers identity, access, security, and authentication platform built for the cloud that secures billions of logins every year. Mid 2020 they raised $120 million at a $1.92 billion valuation after being told no several times. Then, earlier this year in March they announced they were being acquired by Okta for $6.5 billion, in a bold and future-thinking all stock deal. This episode is full of wisdom, inspiration, and tactical advice that Eugenio has used to build Auth0.
From open source to commercially viable
This week Adam is joined by Asim Aslam, the founder of Micro - a new cloud platform entirely focused on the developer experience of consuming and publishing public APIs. Asim’s journey spans many years of open source work on Micro. His sole focus right now, is evolving that work into a commercially viable business. This episode is jam-packed with stories of great timing, grit, resilence, success and failure, and, of course, lessons learned.
From disrupting the cloud to IPO
This week Adam is joined by Mitch Wainer, previously CMO at DigitalOcean and a member of the founding team. They talk about his journey as an entrepreneur and marketer, the early days at DigitalOcean, and everything that went into disrupting the cloud with blazing fast SSDs. Back in March (2021), DigitalOcean started trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) — this obviously earned Mitch and many others a very large payday. They also talk about the work Mitch is doing now with Welcome and Sponsored.
The journey to massive scale and ultra-resilience
This week Adam talks with Spencer Kimball, CEO and Co-founder of Cockroach Labs — makers of CockroachDB an open source cloud-native distributed SQL database. Cockroach Labs recently raised $160 million dollars on a $2 billion dollar valuation. In this episode, Spencer shares his journey in open source, startups and entrepreneurship, and what they’re doing to build CockroachCloud to meet the needs of applications that require massive scale and ultra-resilience.
Intensely focused on building a software company
This week Adam talks with John-Daniel Trask, co-founder & CEO of Raygun. Raygun is an award-winning application monitoring company founded by John-Daniel Trask (better known as JD) and Jeremy Boyd in Wellington, New Zealand. They have revenues in the 8 digits annually, and have done it with very little funding (~1.7M USD). Today’s conversation with JD shares a ton of wisdom. Listen twice and take notes.
Balancing business and open source
Raj Dutt is the founder and CEO of Grafana Labs. Grafana has become the world’s most popular open source technology used to compose observability dashboards (we use Grafana here at Changelog). Raj and team are 100% focused on building a sustainable business around open source. They have this “big tent” open source ecosystem philosophy that’s driving every aspect of building their business around their open source, as well as other projects in the open source community. But, to understand the wisdom Raj is leading with today, we have to go back to where things got started. To do that we had to go back like Prince to 1999…
Slow and steady wins
Jeff Sheldon is the founder and creator of Ugmonk. Jeff is a designer by trade, and an entrepreneur by accident. I been following Jeff’s journey for the better part of Ugmonk’s existence. I’m also a customer. Jeff and I hold several similar values near and dear to our hearts. In addition to my appreciation for Jeff’s product design abilities, and how he leads his business, I also appreciate Jeff’s awareness and focus on the long hard path.
From acquisition to full conviction
Guy Podjarny is the Founder of Snyk, a security platform that empowers software-driven businesses to develop fast and stay secure. Prior to Snyk, Guy founded Blaze which was acquired by Akamai and became CTO. We talked through the topic of acquisition — the sale, the merge, the learnings, and why Guy might not be planning for Snyk to be acquired anytime soon. We started the conversation with Snyk’s recent raise of $150 million dollars.
Leading GitLab to $100M ARR
Sid Sijbrandij is the Co-founder and CEO of GitLab — an all-remote company and complete DevOps platform. As a company, they have their eyes set on taking the company public to IPO and they’re very outspoken about their culture, open handbook, and how they work as an all-remote company. We talk through where Sid came from, the early days of GitLab, why IPO vs a private sale (like GitHub), what it means to put “family and friends first, work second,” how we should view work, and his biggest fear — the company failing.
Building a real programmable robot
The role of a father plays a pivotal role in a child’s life. Ian Bernstein is a former Founder of Sphero and is now the Founder and Head of Product of Misty Robotics — they’re building the first programmable robot for the home and business. It’s called Misty II. The journey of building Misty II started when Ian was 5 years old and his dad bought him an Apple IIe.
Becoming an accidental founder
Mike McDerment is the founder and CEO of FreshBooks. Believe it or not, Mike became a founder by accident. Like many of us, Mike had an itch that he just had to scratch. One thing led to another and soon enough FreshBooks became a key tool in the belt of many freelancers and agencies looking for an easy way to send invoices and get paid quickly online. We talk through the early days of FreshBooks and how things came to be, why they created a secret competitor to iterate on a bold idea for the future of FreshBooks, and we also cover what keeps Mike excited.